death row 2 (snape/potter)
title: Death Row (2/5?)
pairing: Snape/Potter
warnings: WIP; HBP spoilers
previously: Chapter One: Malfoy Manor
note: big big thank you to buckle_berry and apple_pi for beta-ing like a pair of pros. this chapter is for secrethappiness as a good luck present and a (very) late happy birthday. love you, pinn.
Chapter Two: Godric’s Hollow
Snape comes round with a jolt. He’s lying heavy and tense on something ridged, as though he’s just fallen, and his spine feels cracked at the small of his back. Snape moans a little, groggily aware of damp grass under his fingers, a voice, dimly familiar, muttering to itself near his feet, and what looks like a cliff of mud and a large spreading tree blocking out the moon.
Then a gasp and the voice again, perilously shrill now: “Oh god, he’s coming round, oh god!” Snape gropes about in his head for a face to put to it. There’s a quick sound of scrabbling, panting, which is somehow wildly irritating, and the name’s on the tip of his tongue, when-
“Stupefy!”
The pain and the memory melt and Snape slips back into blackness.
~
“You did him twice?”
“I - I panicked. I think. We fell over when we apparated - or, or at least I did - and he started to wake up. I just knew he was going to look at me. You know - that way, how he does. I couldn’t face it.”
Snape’s eyelids twitch. There’s a splitting headache now to accompany the pain in his lumbar vertebrae. Coming round is much more of a job after two stupefactions, but he has a name to put to the voice this time. Contrary to stated belief, Snape has no desire to look into that vacant expression. Fortunately he is saved.
“All right, no harm done. I’m sure he’s had a lot worse. You can get back to your cuttings. I’ll deal with Severus.”
Snape can practically see the kindly hand on the shoulder through his closed eyelids. Footsteps retreat hesitantly.
“Lupin,” he croaked, “if you don’t deal with that child more severely, he’ll never improve.”
A tut. “He’s hardly a child, Severus. He’s a nineteen-year-old trainee auror.”
“God help us all.”
Snape cracks an eyelid open and turns his head a mind-meltingly painful inch to the left. Lupin is looming over him, where he is lying on what must be an extremely low - table, to judge by the uncomfortable set of his shoulders. Lupin looks dreadful. He looks exactly as two years of full moons and no wolfsbane should have left him. Scratched, loose-fleshed and tired. Snape tries to smirk, but the skin over his skull feels like it’s about to crack open. He groans weakly instead.
“Is it terribly painful, Severus?”
“Augh!”
“Hang on, I’m sure we have some analgesic draft in the kitchen.”
“Not - not Longbottom’s, please!” Severus calls out reedily to the ceiling as Lupin leaves the room.
The potion is weak and gritty - he can taste the lack of expertise, but no immediate lethal qualities - and after the first few drops Snape is able to lift his head and drain the cup himself.
“Who exactly are Charles and Di?” he says, regarding the cup with distaste.
“I think they were…” but Snape doesn’t hear the answer, because he’s too busy surveying the room in horror.
It’s a room that might be called ‘cosy’, though it would make for a decent-sized three-cauldron laboratory. There is a tatty brown three-piece suite, several under-sized tables with small circular scars on top and lamps with knotted tassled lampshades. There is a black plastic box in the corner of the room that Snape recognises as a television. A wand has been left carelessly abandoned beside the television, and it reminds Snape to close his eyes and try to sense his own wand. It is still up his sleeve. A level of trust that is decidedly naïve.
There is a fireplace in the corner, as one would expect, with a mantel over it and photographs, none of which are moving or appear to show anyone at all related to Lupin, or Longbottom. The hearth itself is blocked by a large plastic contraption with glowing bands, which by the scorching sensation afflicting Snape’s left elbow, appears to give out an intense heat to a distance of about a foot and nothing beyond. The room is filled with an orange light that’s both a little sickly and entirely unmagical, and if there’s so much as a stick of real solid wood here, Snape will eat his fingerless gloves.
Aside from a small square piece of framed canvas hung over the fire, the ominous legend “CONSTANT VIGILANCE” picked out in red embroidered letters, the whole place screams Muggle, and not the good sort. Snape’s skin creeps with a desperate longing for his civilised existence in Malfoy Manor. Then he remembers a warm cheek on his thigh.
This evening is an unmitigated disaster.
“…I believe she died in some sort of automobile accident a year or two after I left the school.” Lupin is still talking. “I remember Dumbledore telling me that several of the Muggle parents were quite upset.”
“Fascinating.”
Snape hauls himself off the coffee table, which he finds to be covered in repulsive brown and yellow tiles, and staggers to the armchair. Lupin is still standing, hands behind his back, jogging up and down on the balls of his feet. He looks like he’s about to ask something impertinent. Snape doesn’t let him.
“I would like to know why I am here, Lupin. Why I am not lying in a ditch like Macnair.”
Lupin takes a deep breath and seats himself on the sofa at right-angles from Snape, perching there on the edge of a cushion. It must be supporting half a buttock at best.
“Severus.” For a second it looks like Lupin might take his hand. Snape shrinks away. “None of us thinks you want to be where you are… with You Know Who.”
“The Dark Lord,” Snape says pointedly. You Know Who? “I don’t remember you being this coy, Lupin.”
Lupin has the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Yes, well. These are dark times, Severus. One must learn to compromise. The point is no one thinks you’re there out of choice, you know. Well, actually Alastor does, but he’s out at the supermarket, so you needn’t be afraid.”
“I am not afraid.” Snape sees the little glob of spit land on his lap, but neither of them mentions it.
“I’ve known you for more years than either of us care to remember, I’m sure. And Minerva - well - she never really gave up hope that you would rejoin us, you know.” If eyes might ever be said to swim with the ghosts of one’s past, that is precisely what Lupin’s eyes are doing now. He fixes them on Snape.
“Ah.”
“I couldn’t last more than two months with Fenrir and his werewolves. I admire you, really I do.”
“You admire me?”
“You’re on our side. It’s a big sacrifice - we appreciate that. Well, that is I do, and Neville does.”
Thus are the mighty fallen. The Order of the Phoenix reduced to a werewolf, an insane veteran auror and the most inept wizard in a century. Snape would like to laugh in Lupin’s face.
“We know you’d do whatever was necessary to overcome the D- the, er, You Know Who. To help us.”
“Would I indeed?” To help them. They are fools to suppose he ever felt more than the most rudimentary affiliation to any of them except the headmaster. The boy was kept alive out of necessity. Out of duty - and not to bloody Remus Lupin. He doesn’t owe that penance to anyone these days. These days he resuscitates Potter out of sheer bloody-mindedness, and of course, a perpetual fear for his own wretched life. “And this is why I am here, I suppose?”
Lupin looks into his eyes earnestly for a second or two. He clasps his hands and the pads of his thumbs tap gently together.
“Severus would you like a cup of tea? Or maybe-”
“No.” Lupin twitches at the whip of a word, and Snape feels, briefly, meanly satisfied. “Just tell me what you want and let me go.”
“Absolutely. Of course.” Snape is being mollified. “And we have the neighbours coming around for bridge at ten, so we mustn’t keep you.”
Snape stares. All over the fleshy part of Lupin’s right palm there is a scar that can only be the bite mark of a gigantic tooth-filled maw. This person is a werewolf. This person is having the neighbours over for bridge. The Muggle papers should be informed.
He looks towards the windows, but yellowing lacy curtains obscure the view, and it’s black beyond the glass: they are more visible here inside than anything outside could be. Snape breathes shallowly and hopes the wards are adequate. He has a fully sane person’s fear of discovery, and the situation could very fairly be called compromising. Indeed it could hardly be much more so if he were holding a snifter of brandy and a hand of cards.
“Lupin, where the fuck are we?”
“Didn’t you recognise it when you apparated in?” Lupin asks.
“Hardly. I was stupefied.”
“Yes of course. Neville’s still a little jumpy. You understand of course. He’s lost a lot of friends.”
Snape understands nothing except that Longbottom had endangered his life with his exploding cauldrons on a weekly basis while at school, and was now resorting merely to the neater but no less lethal expedient of severe brain trauma. Plus ça change.
“And after Ron Weasley’s disappearance last month - well. It’s been a difficult time.”
“The Weasley boy was killed?”
Lupin sighs. “No one knows, Severus. There have been so many losses.”
There’s a mournful silence - on Lupin’s part at least. Severus grows impatient. Lupin still hasn’t answered his question.
“Accio teatray.”
A tray with two horribly flowered cups, a bottle of milk and a teapot with a yellow and orange crocheted teacosy hoves unsteadily into view. Severus shifts a little, feeling every movement of his hands and hips as a throb around his temples. Why must everyone be so bloody obsessed with tea?
“Are you sure you won’t? No?” Lupin pours by hand. “I’m not surprised you don’t recognise the place, Severus. We didn’t realise it had all been rebuilt either until Harry came back here two years ago. After the headmaster died.” He pauses, eyes flicking upwards at Snape almost imperceptibly. “It was rubble the last time anyone was here - well of course you know that as well as anyone - but when Harry came they’d put up a Muggle estate, pretty little modern houses, don’t you think?”
“Hardly.”
Lupin smiles a little, ignoring him. “The old Muggle couple were quite happy to sell us this one - naturally we paid them handsomely. They were most kind. Left us all the furniture.”
Lupin stops to take a sip of tea, gesturing with a lift of his elbow in the direction of the curtains. Snape looks around himself again. Godric’s Hollow. This hideous little room, and outside, he supposes, a row of equally hideous little houses. He wonders what Potter must have thought when he found them. Bridge parties and teacosies. Hardly a fitting tribute to his first great triumph over evil.
“Of course there were no horcruxes to be found, but then there wouldn’t be, would there?”
Only the one knocking hopefully at the door, Severus thinks. A whole scene unfolds in his mind’s eye, of course involving teatrays, sugar lumps and cake, and most likely the cooing of two elderly Muggles over the poor young boy whose parents used to live here, god rest their souls.
“How is Harry, Severus?” Lupin asks the question tentatively, only looking up from his teacup when it’s been asked.
“How do you suppose? He spends the majority of his time trying to kill himself.” It’s only a minor exaggeration. It was certainly true a month ago.
Lupin nods. This apparently comes as no surprise at all.
“And when the time comes, you will help him of course.”
“Haven’t I always helped him?” Snape says in a sour voice.
The way Lupin leans forward in his chair, eyes alight with enthusiastic sympathy, makes Snape’s scalp prickle oddly. They seem to be coming to the point. He wishes he’d said yes to tea so he could be holding it in front of him like a barrier, something to occupy his fingers.
“We love him, Severus. Of course we know it can’t be avoided, but we’d like it to be as painless as possible.”
And then it’s all for the best, because if Snape had been holding a teacup he would certainly have dropped it.
~
Lupin stands in the poky little hall at the threshold to another box-shaped room.
“This was where we kept the Hufflepuff goblet,” he says and stands looking up towards the ceiling as Severus steps inside.
There’s no goblet here now, just a room: blackened, pitted, a great rough hole in the ceiling. The walls look partially melted, grooves and stains run from picture rail to floor. In one corner is Longbottom, standing as if pinned with his back to a trestle table. He is surrounded by pots of aconite stalks, all growing beautifully, confidently. For wolfsbane, of course. Snape wants to laugh. What a brilliant waste of time. For all Longbottom’s apparent skill in plant husbandry, three more hopeless brewers you could not find. Snape does not laugh, but finds some forgotten pleasure in staring at Longbottom, lip curled.
“P-Professor,” Longbottom mumbles. His pots rattle.
“You see, I thought as you did, Severus,” Lupin continues. “I thought there must be another way. He is practically my godson now, after all. Since Sirius.”
The regretful look is back. Dear Merlin, is there no one Lupin will not drag into this? Disgusting hypocrite.
“Alastor, on the other hand has always favoured the direct route. It was an incredible piece of luck when we managed to pick up You Know Who last March. An incredible piece of containment as well. There are those who disparage Moody you know? They say he is past his best.”
“Surely not.”
“Indeed they do. But he has the reflexes of a twenty-year-old.” Lupin sighs and looks at his own hands. The pale fingers tremble so sharply that Snape would be surprised if he could ward off so much as a jelly-legs hex these days. Lupin grips at his lapels and the trembling stops. “We brought him back here in a Perspex cube, killed him that same afternoon.”
“Yes. I think I remember the afternoon.”
He remembers how his arm had hurt so much he almost took an axe to it, the shrieking of the Death Eaters, Wormtail weeping inconsolably in the corridor. Not that anyone had tried to console him, of course.
“Alastor used the killing curse and his body just disintegrated. It was uncannily easy. Then Nymphadora - Tonks, that is - was shouting that the goblet was growing. It was on a table - here,” Lupin draws a circle in the air in the middle of the room. “The table was completely crushed and the goblet kept growing until it was a foot from the ceiling, and there was this popping noise. It made that hole that you can see there.” Snape looks up again. “Of course You Know Who’s whole soul had escaped into it. It was incredible. For five days it was filled with red liquid, like blood, and the smell. It smelt like honey, or like chocolate - so sweet it was quite overpowering, but the liquid burnt like lava, you see.” Lupin waves his arm at the wall. “Dora always loved chocolate,” he says mournfully. “Alastor says all that was left were her plimsolls. Despicable.”
Snape runs a thumb along a furrow in the wall. It is marked with brown smears and black smoke. The idea of it is remarkable; it is unspeakably fascinating. Snape leans closer for a moment, closes his eyes, tries to sense the dark magic scored into these walls.
“Five days, you said?”
Lupin sighs. “Yes. After five days the goblet was empty. It shrank back to normal size and the soul was gone. I think he’d managed to regenerate himself. We destroyed the goblet, naturally, and by a sheer stroke of luck we managed to hold onto his wand. I’m not sure if it’s of any use, but it’s a victory of a sort. Neville uses it to change the programme on the television now, don’t you, Neville? Gives us all a chuckle, I must admit,” and sure enough Lupin chuckles. For a brief moment Longbottom looks like he’s trying for a shy smile. The attempt is a failure. Instead he gropes to his side for a trowel and turns back to his pots.
“Anyway, Severus, you can see our problem, surely. We can only imagine what might happen if Harry took on You Know Who’s soul. It would be terrible - a disaster for us all. So you see you must try, Severus - I know that monster is keeping him alive, but we are closing in. We’ve already found your headquarters and we could be inside the manor in less than a week. For all our sakes you must do everything you can to help him die before we get close to You Know Who.”
Severus does not examine the sudden sick feeling in his throat. “I have no affection for the boy, as you know, Lupin.”
“I know.” Lupin looks at his feet. “But I’m sure you will be - kind - to him.”
~
Snape sees himself out.
He apparates back to the manor grounds, this time with two wands secreted in his sleeve instead of one, and strides across the grass almost at a jog. There is no room for fear now, no matter how well founded: he must slide in unnoticed and hope to god he hasn’t been missed. Even the anger that has been swilling around his system since early this evening and came dangerously close to erupting all over Remus Lupin is tamped down by a sharp sense of purpose.
The hall of the manor is mercifully empty. Snape heads downstairs to the kitchen, where he finds the younger Malfoy standing next to the table, wand pointing at the contents of a limp-looking sandwich.
“Professor! Where in Merlin’s name have you been?” Malfoy asks with a smirk. “We’ve been in uproar. Did you hear? There was a break-in.” Malfoy repeats the information as if it’s a tremendous joke. “Everyone running around like their arses had been incendio’d, and not a soul to sort out a decent dinner.” He looks with a sad disparagement at the sandwich.
“I saw no one.”
“Well there’s a group gone out patrolling - I think Crabbe was in charge of that -”
Since Severus had entered and crossed the grounds unimpeded this seemed like a fair assumption.
“Of course my father and Aunt Bella are in deep consultation with Lord V, as is the Carrow woman. It was Carrow who sighted him - a redhead apparently, and we all know what that means. He was out of the window before she could land a bodybind on him, but naturally the Order is suspected. After all it could only be some sort of Weasley.”
A Weasley certainly, Snape thinks, but evidently no longer part of the Order. How interesting.
“And Potter?”
“Oh, don’t worry about Potter. I went in as soon as you left, spent most of the evening watching him scowl at thin air. When all hell broke loose and father came to check, I told him you’d popped out, asked me to watch the hostage. He wasn’t too happy at first, but I brought the full force of my diplomatic skills to bear and I think we got away with it.”
“We?”
Malfoy looks up again from his sandwich, surprised. “Of course ‘we’, professor. Us prison warders must stick together.”
“I am grateful, Draco.” Snape grits his teeth. “And in this spirit of - united purpose - there is something we must discuss. Where is the elf?”
“Locked in the pantry, I think. Some of the crab apple harvest has started to ferment.”
Snape lays his palms on the table and Malfoy looks at them suspiciously, as if they might make a grab for his sandwich. Ironic, considering the doubts circling in Severus’s own mind. As a rule of thumb, one should not trust a Malfoy - self-seeking sycophants, the lot of them, only varying in their degree of brutishness - but really what choice does he have?
“I’m taking the boy.”
Malfoy does not look up. He does not even appear surprised. “Where are you taking him?”
“Somewhere he can be more use.”
“Is he going to be your cleaner?” Malfoy sounds enthusiastic.
“Draco, exactly how long do you think we’ll survive once this war is over?”
It’s a rhetorical question, and thank Merlin for someone with the wit and subtlety to appreciate that. Potter would doubtless have tried to answer, and in the most insolent way possible.
“We are suspect. No side has any reason to favour us. I am taking the boy somewhere where he is not in immediate danger of death and where I can research his situation in relative peace. I will need you to bring me news. There is no reason for them to suspect your involvement.”
Malfoy nods with his mouth full of sandwich and eyes carefully blank. “I knew it,” he mumbles. A crumb flies out of his mouth and lands on Snape’s shoulder. They both stare at it for a tense moment and Malfoy stops chewing.
Finally Snape looks away. He removes a silver signet ring from his right hand and gives it to Malfoy.
“A portkey. It is spelled to activate at two o’clock every morning. Please wear it tonight, and please ensure you are alone.”
The ring is examined and held up to the light, turned and turned again, then slipped onto Malfoy’s own hand and admired once more, fingers spread flat.
“I can’t think what you mean,” Malfoy says quietly. He is fiddling with the fit and trying it on different fingers when Snape turns and leaves the kitchen.
~
It is gone midnight and Snape is armed with a new phial of the sedative draft, his pockets heavy with shrunken books and other personal effects, when he pushes open the door to Potter’s room. His feet are barely across the threshold, but he hesitates, peers past the door to assess the situation. He might have expected Potter to be in bed by this time, but he is not.
The boy is sitting cross-legged on that dratted rug facing straight into the fire, reading, apparently entirely unaware that there is a Death Eater at the door. Something unwinds a little fearfully in Snape’s chest at what he is about to do, but it is quickly stamped on. The boy is nineteen, to all intents and purposes an auror - if there had ever been time to train him, although Snape suspects there was not. Skilled at curses as well as defence, wiry and quick - he is not defenceless, and he is certainly far from helpless.
“Potter,” he says, shutting the door. The boy looks up from his book and is surprised for a second before his jaw tightens palpably and a disgusting flush spreads up his neck. Snape takes a large and fortifying breath.
“Potter, stand up.” He does so, then backs quickly away towards the wall by the mantel, stumbling slightly, as Snape strides up to him, evidently closer than he expected.
The boy’s embarrassment and fear only compounds what is already a humiliating situation. Snape is close enough to feel that awful heat from Potter’s face again, and they’re so near to the fire that it stings at the hairs on Snape's thighs through two layers of cloth.
He takes hold of a bunch of hair at the back of Potter’s neck and pulls his head back a degree or two. Perhaps he yanks a little too hard or perhaps his fingers are sticking into Potter’s skin because the boy’s hands drop the book they were holding to grip at his forearms, and he gasps, and when his mouth opens Snape tips in the phial of sedative. He drops the glass tube into the fire and holds Potter’s jaw closed, lips open, teeth clamped, until he is forced to swallow.
Potter’s anger flares for a second or two, and Snape keeps him safely pinned against the side of the mantel with an elbow, then his eyelids slide a fraction and his body relaxes, all soft muscle and limbs, suddenly incredibly heavy despite his small frame, and he begins to slip down the wall.
With one of Potter’s arms slung around Snape’s neck and one of Snape’s hands gripping tightly to his waist, they stagger three feet to the sofa and turn so that Potter can collapse on it in a messy sprawl. Potter is so delirious that he smiles a little, turning his head, as Snape kneels by his side and puts two fingers to his pulse. The beat is slow but solid and regular - healthy, just a little drugged.
Snape pulls away slightly and takes out his wand, flicking it at the bedsheets so that they stretch and twist together to form a long hump, which rises gently then falls, rises and falls. When he rounds on Potter, wand still poised, that small smile disappears.
“Potter, I have no doubt that you will once again misconstrue my motives, but what I’m about to do is wholly for your own benefit.”
The wand swishes again and Harry blinks in surprise then begins to shrink. The wand stays pointed as he diminishes to the size of a long thin child - hair scrubbing downwards against the cushion, feet dangling high off the floor - and keeps going. He begins to scramble against the sedative, sleepy but frightened, his mouth open like he wants to shout. When he is roughly palm-sized, Snape lowers his wand and bends down.
“I am going to pick you up and put you in my pocket, Mr Potter. You are in no danger from me. Please endeavour not to struggle.”
Potter does not struggle when Snape grips him gingerly round the waist between thumb and forefinger, but lies flat on Snape’s hand as he is lifted, practically spread-eagled, his tiny fingers gripping at the fleshy heel of Snape’s palm. Wary of contemplating what degree of terror or anger the boy would have reached if he were not drugged to the gills, Snape up-ends his hand over the right inner pocket of his robe and Potter slides limply in.
~
“Severus!”
There has been a shifting in Snape’s pocket, but it stills instantly, as does Snape himself. Fortunately he is only a yard or two down the corridor from Potter’s door, not yet culpably close to escape. Two tiny points of pressure, like hands, press into Snape’s chest.
“Lucius.” Snape turns, concentrating on sealing tight the vulnerable avenues of his mind. “I understand there was a disturbance this evening. I apologise that I was not available to assist.”
“Oh, it is no matter, Severus.” The tone is droll, but Lucius Malfoy’s gaze slices like a knife. Snape’s right hand itches to cradle his chest protectively. “We have the matter fully in hand. Your help was and is most unnecessary: the Weasley boy was inside the walls for a minute or two at most.” Snape’s pocket twitches, a movement surely too small even for Lucius to notice, but his smile is knowing, all teeth and no eyes. “I believe we may have caught him with a withering hex as he made his escape. Nevertheless, Severus, I understand from my son that the tediousness of guarding your charge quite overcame you this evening. I assure you that I took your part entirely, but the Dark Lord wishes it to be known that such dereliction is unacceptable. He wishes me to tell you that the next time you neglect your sworn duty in this way you will pay for it with your liver. The time after that with your heart.”
Tiny fingers prick through Severus’s shirt like pins. It is far from the first time he has heard such threats, but his pulse spikes with fear, there on the right side of his chest, stronger almost than his heartbeat. He manages a slight nod.
“I am obliged to you, Lucius, for your consideration.”
“Severus, we are old friends.” Malfoy reaches a hand out and grasps Snape’s left forearm. A beautifully manicured thumb digs into the mark they both see plain as day under his robes. “We should always remember where our loyalties lie, should we not? Do have a pleasant night.”
Despite the valediction, they stand for a moment, a tableau of greeting, or friendship, then Lucius digs his thumb deep one last time, lets go and sweeps past Snape and down the corridor towards the main staircase, cane snapping on the tiles.
If he checks the boy’s room he will find nothing amiss, Snape assures himself as he walks slowly towards the kitchen stairs. Finally his hand comes up to cover that little area of his chest, which remains silent and completely still.
~
A streetlight gutters out as Snape stalks round the corner and up the slight incline of Spinner’s End. He is already a little out of breath from the dash across the heath. He had hidden in that blasted copse for five whole minutes as Goyle loitered, picking his nose, close enough to hit with a well-judged stone, then he had run.
The windows of his own little terrace are roughly boarded up and what light there is in the kitchen comes in splinters through the gaps. It is at least nine months since anyone has been inside this tiny house and Snape has to sweep away a mat of cobwebs before he lifts Potter from his pocket by one small arm and sets him on the kitchen chair. The tiny boy lolls a bit to one side and as Snape spells him back to full size, a swatch of light falls on his face. It is distinctly vague, unsettlingly pale, and for a second or two, Potter grasps the edge of the table, swaying in his chair, then stands, turns, and vomits quietly into the sink.
Discretion being the better part of valour, Snape looks away, glad that he was not the one being jolted around in a pocket, and decides to see about tea. He has warmed the water and is still craning into the larder after cups when the chair crashes into a cupboard next to him. Evidently a large part of the sedative potion has also ended up in the sink. Snape reaches into his sleeve reflexively and accidentally pulls the wrong wand. Potter, Gryffindor that he is, is too furious to notice.
“Sit down,” Snape says, biting at the words, and almost before he’s said it the chair has righted itself and is pushing at Potter’s calves. The boy sits with a thump and is pressed forward so hard that the edge of the table cuts into his stomach.
The wand is vibrating with enthusiasm in Snape’s grip and he slides it hastily back into his sleeve.
“Potter, if you wish to be stunned you are going about it in the right way.”
Potter tries to push back from the table, but he appears to be pinned fast. His face is pink with anger and his hair wild and woolly from the adventure of the pocket. A fist crashes on the table top.
“If this is about your friend Weasley -” Potter’s eyes go wide and his teeth clamp. Evidently it is. “- I am afraid there is nothing I can do. However past experience leads me to suspect that Carrow did not manage to fix an effective curse on him.” Snape places a cup on the table in front of Potter and fills it with peppermint tea. Potter leans close enough for his glasses to fog, and sniffs at it. “It’s tea, Mr Potter. How many times? You should drink it - it may help to settle your stomach.”
Snape leaves him there, stuck in the chair with his back to the door, shoulders high and tense.
The spiders have crept out of the sitting room corners too, and when he casts a dim lumos there is an almost perceptible scattering. One hairy beast scuttles clumsily across the low table that Snape had occasionally used as a footstool when he was alone and unobserved.
Severus unshrinks a tub of floo powder concealed in his left breast pocket and looks inside. There is enough for five calls, perhaps six, if his initial hunch proves incorrect. There is, however, no wood or coal to put in the hearth and Snape peers around the room for something flammable. On the arm of his reading chair is a potions journal, put down in haste nine months ago when they’d been summoned to the manor. Snape had left it, knowing with a sort of despair that he’d probably never again have to brew anything more complex than Creeping Death, and even Longbottom had managed that once in the third year - by accident of course. The journal gives off a bitter chemical smell when incendio’d; Snape scatters the powder on the small fire and the smell and heat are gone and the room glows green.
Snape’s jaw stiffens with distaste. He kneels and holds his head over the flames as if over an executioner’s block.
“The Burrow.”
On the other side, there is a hazy curtain of heat and a clutter the likes of which he hasn’t seen since Grimmauld Place. A gangly ginger-haired figure sits at a wooden table, trouser leg rolled up to the knee and head bowed over a large gash on his shin.
Snape clears his throat.
~
“You can sleep in here.”
Snape holds the sitting room door open, and watches Potter stare distastefully at the grubby little parlour. Even in comparison with his cell at Malfoy Manor it is uninviting. Besides, it is merely the exchange of one prison for another. As a concession Snape transfigures the old brown leather chair into a low divan. The sight of it draws a sulky yawn out of the boy.
“It’s very late,” Snape presses. He looks at the boy’s shoulders and feels more anxious than perhaps he should. “By ten o’clock tomorrow morning this house will be full of Death Eaters.” He hesitates and Potter stares at him, one eyebrow raised in what can only be irony. Snape clears his throat. “However that may be, we will need to leave early, as we will both be in extreme danger. Now please go to sleep.”
Perhaps surprisingly Potter obeys, and goes to lie on the divan. No somnus spell is needed. Potter sleeps on his front with his hands balled under his chest, his legs splayed and bent. His hair spreads with static; it will be a fright in the morning. After ten minutes of hovering in the doorway, jumping a little at every jerk and twitch as Potter settles into sleep, Snape enters and arranges himself on the floor opposite the boy, top to toe for decency’s sake. He won’t sleep himself. Despite what he told the boy, if someone thinks to check on the hostage, or if Draco is apprehended, the Death Eaters will be here in an instant.
Snape’s heart beats, oddly fast, into the floorboards. He keeps watch, his eyes fixed on the boy’s feet, and waits for whichever Malfoy will arrive first.
Chapter Three
pairing: Snape/Potter
warnings: WIP; HBP spoilers
previously: Chapter One: Malfoy Manor
note: big big thank you to buckle_berry and apple_pi for beta-ing like a pair of pros. this chapter is for secrethappiness as a good luck present and a (very) late happy birthday. love you, pinn.
Chapter Two: Godric’s Hollow
Snape comes round with a jolt. He’s lying heavy and tense on something ridged, as though he’s just fallen, and his spine feels cracked at the small of his back. Snape moans a little, groggily aware of damp grass under his fingers, a voice, dimly familiar, muttering to itself near his feet, and what looks like a cliff of mud and a large spreading tree blocking out the moon.
Then a gasp and the voice again, perilously shrill now: “Oh god, he’s coming round, oh god!” Snape gropes about in his head for a face to put to it. There’s a quick sound of scrabbling, panting, which is somehow wildly irritating, and the name’s on the tip of his tongue, when-
“Stupefy!”
The pain and the memory melt and Snape slips back into blackness.
~
“You did him twice?”
“I - I panicked. I think. We fell over when we apparated - or, or at least I did - and he started to wake up. I just knew he was going to look at me. You know - that way, how he does. I couldn’t face it.”
Snape’s eyelids twitch. There’s a splitting headache now to accompany the pain in his lumbar vertebrae. Coming round is much more of a job after two stupefactions, but he has a name to put to the voice this time. Contrary to stated belief, Snape has no desire to look into that vacant expression. Fortunately he is saved.
“All right, no harm done. I’m sure he’s had a lot worse. You can get back to your cuttings. I’ll deal with Severus.”
Snape can practically see the kindly hand on the shoulder through his closed eyelids. Footsteps retreat hesitantly.
“Lupin,” he croaked, “if you don’t deal with that child more severely, he’ll never improve.”
A tut. “He’s hardly a child, Severus. He’s a nineteen-year-old trainee auror.”
“God help us all.”
Snape cracks an eyelid open and turns his head a mind-meltingly painful inch to the left. Lupin is looming over him, where he is lying on what must be an extremely low - table, to judge by the uncomfortable set of his shoulders. Lupin looks dreadful. He looks exactly as two years of full moons and no wolfsbane should have left him. Scratched, loose-fleshed and tired. Snape tries to smirk, but the skin over his skull feels like it’s about to crack open. He groans weakly instead.
“Is it terribly painful, Severus?”
“Augh!”
“Hang on, I’m sure we have some analgesic draft in the kitchen.”
“Not - not Longbottom’s, please!” Severus calls out reedily to the ceiling as Lupin leaves the room.
The potion is weak and gritty - he can taste the lack of expertise, but no immediate lethal qualities - and after the first few drops Snape is able to lift his head and drain the cup himself.
“Who exactly are Charles and Di?” he says, regarding the cup with distaste.
“I think they were…” but Snape doesn’t hear the answer, because he’s too busy surveying the room in horror.
It’s a room that might be called ‘cosy’, though it would make for a decent-sized three-cauldron laboratory. There is a tatty brown three-piece suite, several under-sized tables with small circular scars on top and lamps with knotted tassled lampshades. There is a black plastic box in the corner of the room that Snape recognises as a television. A wand has been left carelessly abandoned beside the television, and it reminds Snape to close his eyes and try to sense his own wand. It is still up his sleeve. A level of trust that is decidedly naïve.
There is a fireplace in the corner, as one would expect, with a mantel over it and photographs, none of which are moving or appear to show anyone at all related to Lupin, or Longbottom. The hearth itself is blocked by a large plastic contraption with glowing bands, which by the scorching sensation afflicting Snape’s left elbow, appears to give out an intense heat to a distance of about a foot and nothing beyond. The room is filled with an orange light that’s both a little sickly and entirely unmagical, and if there’s so much as a stick of real solid wood here, Snape will eat his fingerless gloves.
Aside from a small square piece of framed canvas hung over the fire, the ominous legend “CONSTANT VIGILANCE” picked out in red embroidered letters, the whole place screams Muggle, and not the good sort. Snape’s skin creeps with a desperate longing for his civilised existence in Malfoy Manor. Then he remembers a warm cheek on his thigh.
This evening is an unmitigated disaster.
“…I believe she died in some sort of automobile accident a year or two after I left the school.” Lupin is still talking. “I remember Dumbledore telling me that several of the Muggle parents were quite upset.”
“Fascinating.”
Snape hauls himself off the coffee table, which he finds to be covered in repulsive brown and yellow tiles, and staggers to the armchair. Lupin is still standing, hands behind his back, jogging up and down on the balls of his feet. He looks like he’s about to ask something impertinent. Snape doesn’t let him.
“I would like to know why I am here, Lupin. Why I am not lying in a ditch like Macnair.”
Lupin takes a deep breath and seats himself on the sofa at right-angles from Snape, perching there on the edge of a cushion. It must be supporting half a buttock at best.
“Severus.” For a second it looks like Lupin might take his hand. Snape shrinks away. “None of us thinks you want to be where you are… with You Know Who.”
“The Dark Lord,” Snape says pointedly. You Know Who? “I don’t remember you being this coy, Lupin.”
Lupin has the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Yes, well. These are dark times, Severus. One must learn to compromise. The point is no one thinks you’re there out of choice, you know. Well, actually Alastor does, but he’s out at the supermarket, so you needn’t be afraid.”
“I am not afraid.” Snape sees the little glob of spit land on his lap, but neither of them mentions it.
“I’ve known you for more years than either of us care to remember, I’m sure. And Minerva - well - she never really gave up hope that you would rejoin us, you know.” If eyes might ever be said to swim with the ghosts of one’s past, that is precisely what Lupin’s eyes are doing now. He fixes them on Snape.
“Ah.”
“I couldn’t last more than two months with Fenrir and his werewolves. I admire you, really I do.”
“You admire me?”
“You’re on our side. It’s a big sacrifice - we appreciate that. Well, that is I do, and Neville does.”
Thus are the mighty fallen. The Order of the Phoenix reduced to a werewolf, an insane veteran auror and the most inept wizard in a century. Snape would like to laugh in Lupin’s face.
“We know you’d do whatever was necessary to overcome the D- the, er, You Know Who. To help us.”
“Would I indeed?” To help them. They are fools to suppose he ever felt more than the most rudimentary affiliation to any of them except the headmaster. The boy was kept alive out of necessity. Out of duty - and not to bloody Remus Lupin. He doesn’t owe that penance to anyone these days. These days he resuscitates Potter out of sheer bloody-mindedness, and of course, a perpetual fear for his own wretched life. “And this is why I am here, I suppose?”
Lupin looks into his eyes earnestly for a second or two. He clasps his hands and the pads of his thumbs tap gently together.
“Severus would you like a cup of tea? Or maybe-”
“No.” Lupin twitches at the whip of a word, and Snape feels, briefly, meanly satisfied. “Just tell me what you want and let me go.”
“Absolutely. Of course.” Snape is being mollified. “And we have the neighbours coming around for bridge at ten, so we mustn’t keep you.”
Snape stares. All over the fleshy part of Lupin’s right palm there is a scar that can only be the bite mark of a gigantic tooth-filled maw. This person is a werewolf. This person is having the neighbours over for bridge. The Muggle papers should be informed.
He looks towards the windows, but yellowing lacy curtains obscure the view, and it’s black beyond the glass: they are more visible here inside than anything outside could be. Snape breathes shallowly and hopes the wards are adequate. He has a fully sane person’s fear of discovery, and the situation could very fairly be called compromising. Indeed it could hardly be much more so if he were holding a snifter of brandy and a hand of cards.
“Lupin, where the fuck are we?”
“Didn’t you recognise it when you apparated in?” Lupin asks.
“Hardly. I was stupefied.”
“Yes of course. Neville’s still a little jumpy. You understand of course. He’s lost a lot of friends.”
Snape understands nothing except that Longbottom had endangered his life with his exploding cauldrons on a weekly basis while at school, and was now resorting merely to the neater but no less lethal expedient of severe brain trauma. Plus ça change.
“And after Ron Weasley’s disappearance last month - well. It’s been a difficult time.”
“The Weasley boy was killed?”
Lupin sighs. “No one knows, Severus. There have been so many losses.”
There’s a mournful silence - on Lupin’s part at least. Severus grows impatient. Lupin still hasn’t answered his question.
“Accio teatray.”
A tray with two horribly flowered cups, a bottle of milk and a teapot with a yellow and orange crocheted teacosy hoves unsteadily into view. Severus shifts a little, feeling every movement of his hands and hips as a throb around his temples. Why must everyone be so bloody obsessed with tea?
“Are you sure you won’t? No?” Lupin pours by hand. “I’m not surprised you don’t recognise the place, Severus. We didn’t realise it had all been rebuilt either until Harry came back here two years ago. After the headmaster died.” He pauses, eyes flicking upwards at Snape almost imperceptibly. “It was rubble the last time anyone was here - well of course you know that as well as anyone - but when Harry came they’d put up a Muggle estate, pretty little modern houses, don’t you think?”
“Hardly.”
Lupin smiles a little, ignoring him. “The old Muggle couple were quite happy to sell us this one - naturally we paid them handsomely. They were most kind. Left us all the furniture.”
Lupin stops to take a sip of tea, gesturing with a lift of his elbow in the direction of the curtains. Snape looks around himself again. Godric’s Hollow. This hideous little room, and outside, he supposes, a row of equally hideous little houses. He wonders what Potter must have thought when he found them. Bridge parties and teacosies. Hardly a fitting tribute to his first great triumph over evil.
“Of course there were no horcruxes to be found, but then there wouldn’t be, would there?”
Only the one knocking hopefully at the door, Severus thinks. A whole scene unfolds in his mind’s eye, of course involving teatrays, sugar lumps and cake, and most likely the cooing of two elderly Muggles over the poor young boy whose parents used to live here, god rest their souls.
“How is Harry, Severus?” Lupin asks the question tentatively, only looking up from his teacup when it’s been asked.
“How do you suppose? He spends the majority of his time trying to kill himself.” It’s only a minor exaggeration. It was certainly true a month ago.
Lupin nods. This apparently comes as no surprise at all.
“And when the time comes, you will help him of course.”
“Haven’t I always helped him?” Snape says in a sour voice.
The way Lupin leans forward in his chair, eyes alight with enthusiastic sympathy, makes Snape’s scalp prickle oddly. They seem to be coming to the point. He wishes he’d said yes to tea so he could be holding it in front of him like a barrier, something to occupy his fingers.
“We love him, Severus. Of course we know it can’t be avoided, but we’d like it to be as painless as possible.”
And then it’s all for the best, because if Snape had been holding a teacup he would certainly have dropped it.
~
Lupin stands in the poky little hall at the threshold to another box-shaped room.
“This was where we kept the Hufflepuff goblet,” he says and stands looking up towards the ceiling as Severus steps inside.
There’s no goblet here now, just a room: blackened, pitted, a great rough hole in the ceiling. The walls look partially melted, grooves and stains run from picture rail to floor. In one corner is Longbottom, standing as if pinned with his back to a trestle table. He is surrounded by pots of aconite stalks, all growing beautifully, confidently. For wolfsbane, of course. Snape wants to laugh. What a brilliant waste of time. For all Longbottom’s apparent skill in plant husbandry, three more hopeless brewers you could not find. Snape does not laugh, but finds some forgotten pleasure in staring at Longbottom, lip curled.
“P-Professor,” Longbottom mumbles. His pots rattle.
“You see, I thought as you did, Severus,” Lupin continues. “I thought there must be another way. He is practically my godson now, after all. Since Sirius.”
The regretful look is back. Dear Merlin, is there no one Lupin will not drag into this? Disgusting hypocrite.
“Alastor, on the other hand has always favoured the direct route. It was an incredible piece of luck when we managed to pick up You Know Who last March. An incredible piece of containment as well. There are those who disparage Moody you know? They say he is past his best.”
“Surely not.”
“Indeed they do. But he has the reflexes of a twenty-year-old.” Lupin sighs and looks at his own hands. The pale fingers tremble so sharply that Snape would be surprised if he could ward off so much as a jelly-legs hex these days. Lupin grips at his lapels and the trembling stops. “We brought him back here in a Perspex cube, killed him that same afternoon.”
“Yes. I think I remember the afternoon.”
He remembers how his arm had hurt so much he almost took an axe to it, the shrieking of the Death Eaters, Wormtail weeping inconsolably in the corridor. Not that anyone had tried to console him, of course.
“Alastor used the killing curse and his body just disintegrated. It was uncannily easy. Then Nymphadora - Tonks, that is - was shouting that the goblet was growing. It was on a table - here,” Lupin draws a circle in the air in the middle of the room. “The table was completely crushed and the goblet kept growing until it was a foot from the ceiling, and there was this popping noise. It made that hole that you can see there.” Snape looks up again. “Of course You Know Who’s whole soul had escaped into it. It was incredible. For five days it was filled with red liquid, like blood, and the smell. It smelt like honey, or like chocolate - so sweet it was quite overpowering, but the liquid burnt like lava, you see.” Lupin waves his arm at the wall. “Dora always loved chocolate,” he says mournfully. “Alastor says all that was left were her plimsolls. Despicable.”
Snape runs a thumb along a furrow in the wall. It is marked with brown smears and black smoke. The idea of it is remarkable; it is unspeakably fascinating. Snape leans closer for a moment, closes his eyes, tries to sense the dark magic scored into these walls.
“Five days, you said?”
Lupin sighs. “Yes. After five days the goblet was empty. It shrank back to normal size and the soul was gone. I think he’d managed to regenerate himself. We destroyed the goblet, naturally, and by a sheer stroke of luck we managed to hold onto his wand. I’m not sure if it’s of any use, but it’s a victory of a sort. Neville uses it to change the programme on the television now, don’t you, Neville? Gives us all a chuckle, I must admit,” and sure enough Lupin chuckles. For a brief moment Longbottom looks like he’s trying for a shy smile. The attempt is a failure. Instead he gropes to his side for a trowel and turns back to his pots.
“Anyway, Severus, you can see our problem, surely. We can only imagine what might happen if Harry took on You Know Who’s soul. It would be terrible - a disaster for us all. So you see you must try, Severus - I know that monster is keeping him alive, but we are closing in. We’ve already found your headquarters and we could be inside the manor in less than a week. For all our sakes you must do everything you can to help him die before we get close to You Know Who.”
Severus does not examine the sudden sick feeling in his throat. “I have no affection for the boy, as you know, Lupin.”
“I know.” Lupin looks at his feet. “But I’m sure you will be - kind - to him.”
~
Snape sees himself out.
He apparates back to the manor grounds, this time with two wands secreted in his sleeve instead of one, and strides across the grass almost at a jog. There is no room for fear now, no matter how well founded: he must slide in unnoticed and hope to god he hasn’t been missed. Even the anger that has been swilling around his system since early this evening and came dangerously close to erupting all over Remus Lupin is tamped down by a sharp sense of purpose.
The hall of the manor is mercifully empty. Snape heads downstairs to the kitchen, where he finds the younger Malfoy standing next to the table, wand pointing at the contents of a limp-looking sandwich.
“Professor! Where in Merlin’s name have you been?” Malfoy asks with a smirk. “We’ve been in uproar. Did you hear? There was a break-in.” Malfoy repeats the information as if it’s a tremendous joke. “Everyone running around like their arses had been incendio’d, and not a soul to sort out a decent dinner.” He looks with a sad disparagement at the sandwich.
“I saw no one.”
“Well there’s a group gone out patrolling - I think Crabbe was in charge of that -”
Since Severus had entered and crossed the grounds unimpeded this seemed like a fair assumption.
“Of course my father and Aunt Bella are in deep consultation with Lord V, as is the Carrow woman. It was Carrow who sighted him - a redhead apparently, and we all know what that means. He was out of the window before she could land a bodybind on him, but naturally the Order is suspected. After all it could only be some sort of Weasley.”
A Weasley certainly, Snape thinks, but evidently no longer part of the Order. How interesting.
“And Potter?”
“Oh, don’t worry about Potter. I went in as soon as you left, spent most of the evening watching him scowl at thin air. When all hell broke loose and father came to check, I told him you’d popped out, asked me to watch the hostage. He wasn’t too happy at first, but I brought the full force of my diplomatic skills to bear and I think we got away with it.”
“We?”
Malfoy looks up again from his sandwich, surprised. “Of course ‘we’, professor. Us prison warders must stick together.”
“I am grateful, Draco.” Snape grits his teeth. “And in this spirit of - united purpose - there is something we must discuss. Where is the elf?”
“Locked in the pantry, I think. Some of the crab apple harvest has started to ferment.”
Snape lays his palms on the table and Malfoy looks at them suspiciously, as if they might make a grab for his sandwich. Ironic, considering the doubts circling in Severus’s own mind. As a rule of thumb, one should not trust a Malfoy - self-seeking sycophants, the lot of them, only varying in their degree of brutishness - but really what choice does he have?
“I’m taking the boy.”
Malfoy does not look up. He does not even appear surprised. “Where are you taking him?”
“Somewhere he can be more use.”
“Is he going to be your cleaner?” Malfoy sounds enthusiastic.
“Draco, exactly how long do you think we’ll survive once this war is over?”
It’s a rhetorical question, and thank Merlin for someone with the wit and subtlety to appreciate that. Potter would doubtless have tried to answer, and in the most insolent way possible.
“We are suspect. No side has any reason to favour us. I am taking the boy somewhere where he is not in immediate danger of death and where I can research his situation in relative peace. I will need you to bring me news. There is no reason for them to suspect your involvement.”
Malfoy nods with his mouth full of sandwich and eyes carefully blank. “I knew it,” he mumbles. A crumb flies out of his mouth and lands on Snape’s shoulder. They both stare at it for a tense moment and Malfoy stops chewing.
Finally Snape looks away. He removes a silver signet ring from his right hand and gives it to Malfoy.
“A portkey. It is spelled to activate at two o’clock every morning. Please wear it tonight, and please ensure you are alone.”
The ring is examined and held up to the light, turned and turned again, then slipped onto Malfoy’s own hand and admired once more, fingers spread flat.
“I can’t think what you mean,” Malfoy says quietly. He is fiddling with the fit and trying it on different fingers when Snape turns and leaves the kitchen.
~
It is gone midnight and Snape is armed with a new phial of the sedative draft, his pockets heavy with shrunken books and other personal effects, when he pushes open the door to Potter’s room. His feet are barely across the threshold, but he hesitates, peers past the door to assess the situation. He might have expected Potter to be in bed by this time, but he is not.
The boy is sitting cross-legged on that dratted rug facing straight into the fire, reading, apparently entirely unaware that there is a Death Eater at the door. Something unwinds a little fearfully in Snape’s chest at what he is about to do, but it is quickly stamped on. The boy is nineteen, to all intents and purposes an auror - if there had ever been time to train him, although Snape suspects there was not. Skilled at curses as well as defence, wiry and quick - he is not defenceless, and he is certainly far from helpless.
“Potter,” he says, shutting the door. The boy looks up from his book and is surprised for a second before his jaw tightens palpably and a disgusting flush spreads up his neck. Snape takes a large and fortifying breath.
“Potter, stand up.” He does so, then backs quickly away towards the wall by the mantel, stumbling slightly, as Snape strides up to him, evidently closer than he expected.
The boy’s embarrassment and fear only compounds what is already a humiliating situation. Snape is close enough to feel that awful heat from Potter’s face again, and they’re so near to the fire that it stings at the hairs on Snape's thighs through two layers of cloth.
He takes hold of a bunch of hair at the back of Potter’s neck and pulls his head back a degree or two. Perhaps he yanks a little too hard or perhaps his fingers are sticking into Potter’s skin because the boy’s hands drop the book they were holding to grip at his forearms, and he gasps, and when his mouth opens Snape tips in the phial of sedative. He drops the glass tube into the fire and holds Potter’s jaw closed, lips open, teeth clamped, until he is forced to swallow.
Potter’s anger flares for a second or two, and Snape keeps him safely pinned against the side of the mantel with an elbow, then his eyelids slide a fraction and his body relaxes, all soft muscle and limbs, suddenly incredibly heavy despite his small frame, and he begins to slip down the wall.
With one of Potter’s arms slung around Snape’s neck and one of Snape’s hands gripping tightly to his waist, they stagger three feet to the sofa and turn so that Potter can collapse on it in a messy sprawl. Potter is so delirious that he smiles a little, turning his head, as Snape kneels by his side and puts two fingers to his pulse. The beat is slow but solid and regular - healthy, just a little drugged.
Snape pulls away slightly and takes out his wand, flicking it at the bedsheets so that they stretch and twist together to form a long hump, which rises gently then falls, rises and falls. When he rounds on Potter, wand still poised, that small smile disappears.
“Potter, I have no doubt that you will once again misconstrue my motives, but what I’m about to do is wholly for your own benefit.”
The wand swishes again and Harry blinks in surprise then begins to shrink. The wand stays pointed as he diminishes to the size of a long thin child - hair scrubbing downwards against the cushion, feet dangling high off the floor - and keeps going. He begins to scramble against the sedative, sleepy but frightened, his mouth open like he wants to shout. When he is roughly palm-sized, Snape lowers his wand and bends down.
“I am going to pick you up and put you in my pocket, Mr Potter. You are in no danger from me. Please endeavour not to struggle.”
Potter does not struggle when Snape grips him gingerly round the waist between thumb and forefinger, but lies flat on Snape’s hand as he is lifted, practically spread-eagled, his tiny fingers gripping at the fleshy heel of Snape’s palm. Wary of contemplating what degree of terror or anger the boy would have reached if he were not drugged to the gills, Snape up-ends his hand over the right inner pocket of his robe and Potter slides limply in.
~
“Severus!”
There has been a shifting in Snape’s pocket, but it stills instantly, as does Snape himself. Fortunately he is only a yard or two down the corridor from Potter’s door, not yet culpably close to escape. Two tiny points of pressure, like hands, press into Snape’s chest.
“Lucius.” Snape turns, concentrating on sealing tight the vulnerable avenues of his mind. “I understand there was a disturbance this evening. I apologise that I was not available to assist.”
“Oh, it is no matter, Severus.” The tone is droll, but Lucius Malfoy’s gaze slices like a knife. Snape’s right hand itches to cradle his chest protectively. “We have the matter fully in hand. Your help was and is most unnecessary: the Weasley boy was inside the walls for a minute or two at most.” Snape’s pocket twitches, a movement surely too small even for Lucius to notice, but his smile is knowing, all teeth and no eyes. “I believe we may have caught him with a withering hex as he made his escape. Nevertheless, Severus, I understand from my son that the tediousness of guarding your charge quite overcame you this evening. I assure you that I took your part entirely, but the Dark Lord wishes it to be known that such dereliction is unacceptable. He wishes me to tell you that the next time you neglect your sworn duty in this way you will pay for it with your liver. The time after that with your heart.”
Tiny fingers prick through Severus’s shirt like pins. It is far from the first time he has heard such threats, but his pulse spikes with fear, there on the right side of his chest, stronger almost than his heartbeat. He manages a slight nod.
“I am obliged to you, Lucius, for your consideration.”
“Severus, we are old friends.” Malfoy reaches a hand out and grasps Snape’s left forearm. A beautifully manicured thumb digs into the mark they both see plain as day under his robes. “We should always remember where our loyalties lie, should we not? Do have a pleasant night.”
Despite the valediction, they stand for a moment, a tableau of greeting, or friendship, then Lucius digs his thumb deep one last time, lets go and sweeps past Snape and down the corridor towards the main staircase, cane snapping on the tiles.
If he checks the boy’s room he will find nothing amiss, Snape assures himself as he walks slowly towards the kitchen stairs. Finally his hand comes up to cover that little area of his chest, which remains silent and completely still.
~
A streetlight gutters out as Snape stalks round the corner and up the slight incline of Spinner’s End. He is already a little out of breath from the dash across the heath. He had hidden in that blasted copse for five whole minutes as Goyle loitered, picking his nose, close enough to hit with a well-judged stone, then he had run.
The windows of his own little terrace are roughly boarded up and what light there is in the kitchen comes in splinters through the gaps. It is at least nine months since anyone has been inside this tiny house and Snape has to sweep away a mat of cobwebs before he lifts Potter from his pocket by one small arm and sets him on the kitchen chair. The tiny boy lolls a bit to one side and as Snape spells him back to full size, a swatch of light falls on his face. It is distinctly vague, unsettlingly pale, and for a second or two, Potter grasps the edge of the table, swaying in his chair, then stands, turns, and vomits quietly into the sink.
Discretion being the better part of valour, Snape looks away, glad that he was not the one being jolted around in a pocket, and decides to see about tea. He has warmed the water and is still craning into the larder after cups when the chair crashes into a cupboard next to him. Evidently a large part of the sedative potion has also ended up in the sink. Snape reaches into his sleeve reflexively and accidentally pulls the wrong wand. Potter, Gryffindor that he is, is too furious to notice.
“Sit down,” Snape says, biting at the words, and almost before he’s said it the chair has righted itself and is pushing at Potter’s calves. The boy sits with a thump and is pressed forward so hard that the edge of the table cuts into his stomach.
The wand is vibrating with enthusiasm in Snape’s grip and he slides it hastily back into his sleeve.
“Potter, if you wish to be stunned you are going about it in the right way.”
Potter tries to push back from the table, but he appears to be pinned fast. His face is pink with anger and his hair wild and woolly from the adventure of the pocket. A fist crashes on the table top.
“If this is about your friend Weasley -” Potter’s eyes go wide and his teeth clamp. Evidently it is. “- I am afraid there is nothing I can do. However past experience leads me to suspect that Carrow did not manage to fix an effective curse on him.” Snape places a cup on the table in front of Potter and fills it with peppermint tea. Potter leans close enough for his glasses to fog, and sniffs at it. “It’s tea, Mr Potter. How many times? You should drink it - it may help to settle your stomach.”
Snape leaves him there, stuck in the chair with his back to the door, shoulders high and tense.
The spiders have crept out of the sitting room corners too, and when he casts a dim lumos there is an almost perceptible scattering. One hairy beast scuttles clumsily across the low table that Snape had occasionally used as a footstool when he was alone and unobserved.
Severus unshrinks a tub of floo powder concealed in his left breast pocket and looks inside. There is enough for five calls, perhaps six, if his initial hunch proves incorrect. There is, however, no wood or coal to put in the hearth and Snape peers around the room for something flammable. On the arm of his reading chair is a potions journal, put down in haste nine months ago when they’d been summoned to the manor. Snape had left it, knowing with a sort of despair that he’d probably never again have to brew anything more complex than Creeping Death, and even Longbottom had managed that once in the third year - by accident of course. The journal gives off a bitter chemical smell when incendio’d; Snape scatters the powder on the small fire and the smell and heat are gone and the room glows green.
Snape’s jaw stiffens with distaste. He kneels and holds his head over the flames as if over an executioner’s block.
“The Burrow.”
On the other side, there is a hazy curtain of heat and a clutter the likes of which he hasn’t seen since Grimmauld Place. A gangly ginger-haired figure sits at a wooden table, trouser leg rolled up to the knee and head bowed over a large gash on his shin.
Snape clears his throat.
~
“You can sleep in here.”
Snape holds the sitting room door open, and watches Potter stare distastefully at the grubby little parlour. Even in comparison with his cell at Malfoy Manor it is uninviting. Besides, it is merely the exchange of one prison for another. As a concession Snape transfigures the old brown leather chair into a low divan. The sight of it draws a sulky yawn out of the boy.
“It’s very late,” Snape presses. He looks at the boy’s shoulders and feels more anxious than perhaps he should. “By ten o’clock tomorrow morning this house will be full of Death Eaters.” He hesitates and Potter stares at him, one eyebrow raised in what can only be irony. Snape clears his throat. “However that may be, we will need to leave early, as we will both be in extreme danger. Now please go to sleep.”
Perhaps surprisingly Potter obeys, and goes to lie on the divan. No somnus spell is needed. Potter sleeps on his front with his hands balled under his chest, his legs splayed and bent. His hair spreads with static; it will be a fright in the morning. After ten minutes of hovering in the doorway, jumping a little at every jerk and twitch as Potter settles into sleep, Snape enters and arranges himself on the floor opposite the boy, top to toe for decency’s sake. He won’t sleep himself. Despite what he told the boy, if someone thinks to check on the hostage, or if Draco is apprehended, the Death Eaters will be here in an instant.
Snape’s heart beats, oddly fast, into the floorboards. He keeps watch, his eyes fixed on the boy’s feet, and waits for whichever Malfoy will arrive first.
Chapter Three